For years I’ve been making the joke about Vladimir Putin’s food taster. As in: Who is that guy? How did he get the job? How does he keep the job? What’s his pulse rate when he tries out the caviar? And, if he’s only the latest, how long do Vlad’s Official Tasters last?

Now, with Putin feeling pressure on a number of fronts, I’ve begun wondering Who Tastes Putin’s Food Taster’s Food? I mean, we are talking Russia here, where a long line of kings and czars and leaders of one stripe or another have, um, “succumbed to nefarious retribution” by one time loyalists suddenly in the mood for their blood.

Obviously, I am no Russia expert. But Russia and Russians have occupied a significant space in my alleged mind nearly my entire life. I was 11 years old during the Cuban missile crisis. We actually did the “duck and cover” drills in grade school. The godless Russian Red Menace was a regular feature of my Catholic upbringing as well as the evening news when I toddled home from school.

As a result, over the years, I’ve padded out the usual consumption of news stories and analyses of Russian government behavior with books about the country, films from the old Soviet Union and more lately, YouTube series from Russian vloggers. Eventually, you do get a grasp of something like the “average Russian mind set”. A mentality set in a startlingly shambolic realm where, to quote the title of one of the better recent books I’ve read, “… Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible.“

Consuming the reporting and punditry of the past five days, I note that plenty is being said about the sanctions on Putin and his closest circle of oligarchs — iuncluding very high profile characters like Chelsea football team owner Roman Abramovich, an early “investor” in Russia’s oil and aluminum businesses. Few believe Putin’s fortune, thought to be well protected in Swiss banks and other off-shore accounts, is in any immediate danger, as in next month or next year. But there have been noisy public statements from European countries — Britain in particular, where the capital has been so saturated with Russian mobster money it has been nicknamed “Londongrad” — that they will at long, long last make life difficult for flagrant thieves who own not one, but two 400-foot yachts, their own personal 787 and … a Premier League football team.

A side story of great interest to me is what the notoriously corrupt international soccer agency, FIFA, floating on gobs of Russian mob money, does in response — to the response — to Putin’s invasion? (Imagine the reaction of American chuckleheads of Biden did something that obliterated the NFL?)

(Another not at all far-fetched notion is what a Spanish Civil War-like call for freedom fighters — from all over the world — to come to Ukraine’s aid might do? Do you doubt there are millions who see this as the moment to make a heroic stand against authoritarian criminals?)

What then does that crowd do to Putin if they are refused access to Western ultra-rich society, have their London, Paris and Miami mansions seized, their children expelled from the toniest British schools and their byzantine financial transactions/money-laundering hobbled by banking restrictions? Is their loyalty to Putin — who made them, despite getting a reported 50% kickback on their lootings — really all enduring? If not, at one point do they in effect, or in reality, gather the Putin family in the basement of a dacha in Yekaterinburg?

The idea of someone — or some cabal — taking out Putin would be preposterous if his invasion of Ukraine didn’t appear so ill-conceived and delusional, so completely divorced from reality. I mean, the guy was on TV the other day ranting — Trump-like — about “drug addicted neo-Nazis”, a reference apparently to Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (Abramovich is also Jewish.)

If your billions in ill-gotten gains are dependent on a character sounding as histrionic and unhinged as that, how long before you start looking for a food taster who knows his way around a vial of Novichuk?